New York Times and USA Today Bestselling novelist, screenwriter, editor, namer, critic, movie addict and chocoholic

Saturday, December 22, 2007

In Which the author gets a ROAR!

Harriet Brown is wonderful. She was the editor of two truly great anthologies, Mr. Wrong (about all those loves you wish you hadn't had) and the upcoming Feed Me: Real-Life Tales of Our Pleasure, Shame, Anxiety, and Ambivalence About Food. I'm really excited about the Feed Me book, and not just because I get to work with Harriet again and because I'm in the company of some truly stellar talents, but because I got to write about an ex who wouldn't let me eat. Writing the piece made me feel as if I were performing a kind of literary exorcism of a fearful time for me (I was 93 pounds and so skinny my friends were about to do an intervention). Why couldn't I leave this guy? Because then I would have had to grieve for another man who had died--which was the reason I got involved with this guy in the first place.) In the essay I also get to put in a little Valentine to my husband--I fell in love with him on our second date because at dinner he insisted that I have no one dessert, but two!

But what really made me so happy was that in her blog, Harriet called me a fearless writer! Who doesn't want to be fearless? I always the writers I work with at UCLA to get that blood on the page, to risk everything--and this comment just made me so joyful.

welcome to my obsessive world

We're a Best Blog!

Stay tuned, THIS OTHER LIFE has sold to Algonquin, my beloved publisher and I am busy writing it now. My 11th novel CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD is an Indie Next Pick. IS THIS TOMORROW was an May Indie Pick. I'm also the New York Times bestselling author of PICTURES OF YOU, a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick." a NAIBA bestseller and on the Best Books of 2011 List from San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. I'm the recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction. I was a 2013 finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Fellowship, four of my novels were optioned for screen, and I talked my way into writing the script for two of them. My essay, HIgh Infidelity, has been optioned for film. I'm a book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle and People Magazine. I teach novel writing for UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and Stanford online, do private fiction editing, and I am a professional namer! I live with my husband, writer/editor Jeff Tamarkin and we beam with pride about our son, an actor/filmmaker in college. Visit me at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.